House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties

Also by Craig Unger

BLUE BLOOD

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The jacket photograph shows President George W. Bush with Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia at the G8 Summit in Evian, France, on June 1, 2003

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To my mother

CONTENTS

Chapter 1: The Great Escape

Chapter 2: The Houston-Jeddah Connection

Chapter 3: The Ascendancy of George H. W. Bush

Chapter 4: Three-Dimensional Chess

Chapter 5: The Double Marriage

Chapter 6: Another Frankenstein

Chapter 7: Friends in High Places

Chapter 8: War Drums

Chapter 9: The Breaking Point

Chapter 10: Masters of the Universe

Chapter 11: A House Divided

Chapter 12: The Arabian Candidate

Chapter 13: Lost in Transition

Chapter 14: 9/11

Chapter 15: Print the Legend

Appendices

Acknowledgments

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

HOUSE of BUSH,

HOUSE of SAUD

CHAPTER ONE

The Great Escape

It was the second Wednesday in September 2001, and for Brian Cortez, a desperately ill twenty-one-year-old man in Seattle, Washington, the day he had long waited for. Two years earlier, Cortez had been diagnosed with congestive heart failure,¹ and since then his prognosis had become even worse: he suffered from dilated cardiomyopathy, a severe swelling of the heart for which the only permanent solution is a transplant.

Cortez had been on the official heart transplant waiting list for months. Now, thanks to an accident in Anchorage, Alaska, an organ was finally available. The transplant team from the University of Washington Medical Center chartered a plane to Alaska to retrieve it as quickly as possible. The human heart can last about eight hours outside the body before it loses its value as a transplanted organ. That was the length of time the medical team had to remove it from the victim’s body, take it to the Anchorage airport, fly approximately fifteen hundred miles from Anchorage to Seattle, get it to the University of Washington Medical Center, and complete the surgery.

Sometime around midnight, the medical team boarded a chartered jet and flew back with its precious cargo. They passed over the Gulf of Alaska and the Queen Charlotte Islands, and finally, Vancouver, Canada. Before they crossed the forty-ninth parallel and reentered U.S. airspace, however, something unexpected happened.

Suddenly, two Royal Canadian Air Force fighters were at the chartered plane’s side. The Canadian military planes then handed it off to two U.S. Air Force F/A-18 fighter jets, which forced it to land.² Less than twenty-four hours earlier, terrorists had hijacked four airliners in the worst atrocity in American history, crashing two of them into New York’s World Trade Center and one into the Pentagon. Nearly three thousand people were dead. America was grounded. Brian Cortez’s new heart was eighty miles short of its destination, and time was running out.³

Cortez’s medical team was not alone in confronting a crisis caused by the shutdown of America’s airspace. The terrorist attacks had grounded all commercial and private aviation throughout the entire United States for the first time in history. Former vice president Al Gore was stranded in Austria because his flight to the United States was canceled. Former president Bill Clinton was stuck in Australia. Major league baseball games were postponed. American skies were nearly as empty as they had been when the Wright brothers first flew at Kitty Hawk. America was paralyzed by terror, and for forty-eight hours, virtually no one could fly.

No one, that is, except for the Saudis.

At the same time that Brian Cortez’s medical team was grounded, Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdul Aziz, the Saudi Arabian ambassador to the United States, was orchestrating the exodus of more than 140 Saudis scattered throughout the country. They included members of two families: One was the royal House of Saud, the family that ruled the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and which, thanks to the country’s vast oil reserves, was without question the richest family in the world. The other family was the Sauds’ close friends and allies, the bin Ladens, who in addition to owning a multibillion-dollar construction conglomerate had spawned the notorious terrorist Osama bin Laden.

At fifty-two, Prince Bandar had long been the most recognizable figure from his country in America. Widely known as the Arab Gatsby, with his trimmed goatee and tailored double-breasted suits, Bandar was the very embodiment of the contradictions inherent in being a modern, jet-setting, Western-leaning member of the royal House of Saud.

Profane, flamboyant, and cocksure, Bandar entertained lavishly at his spectacular estates all over the world. Whenever he was safely out of Saudi Arabia and beyond the reach of the puritanical form of Islam it espoused, he puckishly flouted Islamic tenets by sipping brandy and smoking Cohiba cigars. And when it came to embracing the culture of the infidel West, Bandar outdid even the most ardent admirers of Western civilization—that was him patrolling the sidelines of Dallas Cowboys football games with his friend Jerry Jones, the team’s owner. To militant Islamic fundamentalists who loathed pro-West multibillionaire Saudi royals, no one fit the bill better than Bandar.

And yet, his guise as Playboy of the Western World notwithstanding, deep in his bones, Prince Bandar was a key figure in the world of Islam. His father, Defense Minister Prince Sultan, was second in line to the Saudi crown. Bandar was the nephew of King Fahd, the aging Saudi monarch, and the grandson of the late king Abdul Aziz, the founder of modern Saudi Arabia, who initiated his country’s historic oil-for-security relationship with the United States when he met Franklin D. Roosevelt on the USS Quincy in the Suez Canal on February 14, 1945.⁴ The enormous royal family in which Bandar played such an important role oversaw two of the most sacred places of Islamic worship, the holy mosques in Medina and Mecca.

As a wily international diplomat, Bandar also knew full well just how precarious his family’s position was. For decades, the House of Saud had somehow maintained control of Saudi Arabia and the world’s richest oil reserves by performing a seemingly untenable balancing act with two parties who had vowed to destroy each other.

On the one hand, the House of Saud was an Islamic theocracy whose power grew out of the royal family’s alliance with Wahhabi fundamentalism, a strident and puritanical Islamic sect that provided a fertile breeding ground for a global network of terrorists urging a violent jihad against the United States.

On the other hand, the House of Saud’s most important ally was the Great Satan itself, the United States. Even a cursory examination of the relationship revealed astonishing contradictions: America, the beacon of democracy, was to arm and protect a brutal theocratic monarchy. The United States, sworn defender of Israel, was also the guarantor of security to the guardians of Wahhabi Islam, the fundamentalist religious sect that was one of Israel’s and America’s mortal enemies.

Astoundingly, this fragile relationship had not only endured but in many ways had been spectacularly successful. In the nearly three decades since the oil embargo of 1973, the United States had bought hundreds of billions of dollars of oil at reasonable prices. During that same period, the Saudis had purchased hundreds of billions of dollars of weapons from the United States. The Saudis had supported the United States on regional security matters in Iran and Iraq and refrained from playing an aggressive role against Israel. Members of the Saudi royal family, including Bandar, became billionaires many times over, in the process quietly turning into some of the most powerful players in the American market, investing hundreds of billions of dollars in equities in the United States.⁵ And the price of oil, the eternal bellwether of economic, political, and cultural anxiety in America, had remained low enough that enormous gas-guzzling SUVs had become ubiquitous on U.S. highways. During the Reagan and Clinton eras the economy boomed.

The relationship was a coarse weave of money, power, and trust. It had lasted because two foes, militant Islamic fundamentalists and the United States, turned a blind eye to each other. The U.S. military might have called the policy Don’t ask, don’t tell. The Koran had its own version: Ask not about things which, if made plain to you, may cause you trouble.⁶

But now, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the ugly seams of the relationship had been laid bare. Because thousands of innocent people had been killed and most of the killers were said to be Saudi, it was up to Bandar, ever the master illusionist, to assure Americans that everything was just fine between the United States and Saudi Arabia. Bandar had always been a smooth operator, but now he and his unflappable demeanor would be tested as never before.

Bandar desperately hoped that early reports of the Saudi role had been exaggerated—after all, Al Qaeda terrorist operatives were known to use false passports. But at 10 p.m. on the evening of September 12, about thirty-six hours after the attack, a high-ranking CIA official—according to Newsweek magazine, it was probably CIA director George Tenet—phoned Bandar at his home and gave him the bad news:⁷ Fifteen of the nineteen hijackers were Saudis. Afterward, Bandar said, I felt as if the Twin Towers had just fallen on my head.

Public relations had never been more crucial for the Saudis. Bandar swiftly retained PR giant Burson-Marsteller to place newspaper ads all over the country condemning the attacks and dissociating Saudi Arabia from them.⁸ He went on CNN, the BBC, and the major TV networks and hammered home the same points again and again: The alliance with the United States was still strong. Saudi Arabia would support America in its fight against terrorism.

Prince Bandar also protested media reports that referred to those involved in terrorism as Saudis. Asserting that no terrorists could ever be described as Saudi citizens, he urged the media and politicians to refrain from casting arbitrary accusations against Arabs and Muslims. We in the kingdom, the government and the people of Saudi Arabia, refuse to have any person affiliated with terrorism to be connected to our country, Bandar said.⁹ That included Osama bin Laden, the perpetrator of the attacks, who had even been disowned by his family. He was not really a Saudi, Bandar asserted, for the government had taken away his passport because of his terrorist activities.

But Osama bin Laden was Saudi, of course, and he was not just any Saudi. The bin Ladens were one of a handful of extremely wealthy families that were so close to the House of Saud that they effectively acted as extensions of the royal family. Over five decades, they had built their multibillion-dollar construction empire thanks to their intimate relationship with the royal family. Bandar himself knew them well. They’re really lovely human beings, he told CNN. [Osama] is the only one . . . I met him only once. The rest of them are well-educated, successful businessmen, involved in a lot of charities. It is—it is tragic. I feel pain for them, because he’s caused them a lot of pain.¹⁰

Like Bandar, the bin Laden family epitomized the marriage between the United States and Saudi Arabia. Their huge construction company, the Saudi Binladin Group (SBG),* banked with Citigroup and invested with Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch.¹¹ Over time, the bin Ladens did business with such icons of Western¹² culture as Disney, the Hard Rock Café, Snapple, and Porsche. In the mid-nineties, they joined various members of the House of Saud in becoming business associates with former secretary of state James Baker and former president George H. W. Bush by investing in the Carlyle Group, a gigantic Washington, D.C.–based private equity firm. As Charles Freeman, the former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, told the Wall Street Journal, If there were ever any company closely connected to the U.S. and its presence in Saudi Arabia, it’s the Saudi Binladin Group.¹³

The bin Ladens and members of the House of Saud who spent time in the United States were mostly young professionals and students attending high school or college.¹⁴ Many lived in the Boston area, thanks to its high concentration of colleges. Abdullah bin Laden, a younger brother of Osama’s,* was a 1994 graduate of Harvard Law School and had offices in Cambridge, Massachusetts.¹⁵ Several bin Ladens had attended Tufts University, near Boston.¹⁶ Sana bin Laden had graduated from Wheelock College in Boston and organized a Saudi festival at the Children’s Museum in Boston.¹⁷ Two bin Ladens—Mohammed and Nawaf—owned units in the Flagship Wharf condominium complex in Charlestown Navy Yard on Boston Harbor.¹⁸

Some of the young, chic, sophisticated members of the family appeared even more westernized than Bandar. Wafah† Binladin, a twenty-six-year-old graduate of Columbia Law School, lived in a $6,000-a-month rented loft in New York’s fashionable SoHo¹⁹ and was considering pursuing a singing career. Partial to Manhattan nightspots such as Lotus, the Mercer Kitchen, and Pravda,²⁰ she was in Geneva, Switzerland, at the time of the attack and simply did not return. Kameron bin Laden, a cousin of Osama’s in his thirties, also frequented Manhattan nightspots and spent as much as $30,000 in one day on designer clothes at Prada’s Fifth Avenue boutique.²¹ He elected to stay in the United States.

But half brother Khalil Binladin wanted to go back to Jeddah. Khalil, who had a Brazilian wife, had been appointed as Brazil’s honorary consul in Jeddah²² and owned a sprawling twenty-acre estate in Winter Garden, Florida, near Orlando.²³

As for the Saudi royal family, many of them were scattered all over the United States. Some had gone to Lexington, Kentucky, for the annual September yearling auctions. The sale of the finest racehorses in the world had been suspended after the terrorist attacks on September 11, but resumed the very next day. Saudi prince Ahmed bin Salman bought two horses for $1.2 million on September 12.

Others felt more personally threatened. Shortly after the attack, one of the bin Ladens, an unnamed brother of Osama’s, frantically called the Saudi embassy in Washington seeking protection. He was given a room at the Watergate Hotel and told not to open the door.²⁴ King Fahd, the aging and infirm Saudi monarch, sent a message to his emissaries in Washington. Take measures to protect the innocents, he said.²⁵

Meanwhile, a Saudi prince sent a directive to the Tampa Police Department in Florida that young Saudis who were close to the royal family and went to school in the area were in potential danger.²⁶

Bandar went to work immediately. If any foreign official had the clout to pull strings at the White House in the midst of a grave national security crisis, it was he. A senior member of the Washington diplomatic corps, Bandar had played racquetball with Secretary of State Colin Powell in the late seventies. He had run covert operations for the late CIA director Bill Casey that were so hush-hush they were kept secret even from President Ronald Reagan. He was the man who had stashed away thirty locked attaché cases that held some of the deepest secrets in the intelligence world.²⁷ And for two decades, Bandar had built an intimate personal relationship with the Bush family that went far beyond a mere political friendship.

First, Bandar set up a hotline at the Saudi embassy in Washington for all Saudi nationals in the United States. For the forty-eight hours after the attacks, he stayed in constant contact with Secretary of State Colin Powell and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice.²⁸

Before the attacks, Bandar had been invited to come to the White House to meet with President George W. Bush on September 13 to discuss the Middle East peace process.²⁹ Even though the fifty-five-year-old president and he were, roughly speaking, contemporaries, Bandar had not yet developed the same rapport with the younger Bush that he’d enjoyed for decades with his father. Bandar and the elder Bush had participated in the shared rituals of manhood—hunting trips, vacations together, and the like. Bandar and the younger Bush were well-known to each other, but not nearly as close.

On the thirteenth, the meeting went ahead as scheduled. But in the wake of the attacks two days earlier, the political landscape of the Middle East had drastically changed. A spokesman for the Saudi embassy later said he did not know whether repatriation was a topic of discussion.

But the job had been started nonetheless. Earlier that same day, a forty-nine-year-old former policeman turned private investigator named Dan Grossi got a call from the Tampa (Florida) Police Department. Grossi had worked with the Tampa force for twenty years before retiring, and it was not particularly unusual for the police to recommend former officers for special security jobs. But Grossi’s new assignment was very much out of the ordinary.

The police had been giving Saudi students protection since September eleventh, Grossi recalls. They asked if I was interested in escorting these students from Tampa to Lexington, Kentucky, because the police department couldn’t do it.

Grossi was told to go to the airport, where a small charter jet would be available to take him and the Saudis on their flight. He was not given a specific time of departure, and he was dubious about the prospects of accomplishing his task. Quite frankly, I knew that everything was grounded, he says. I never thought this was going to happen. Even so, Grossi, who’d been asked to bring a colleague, phoned Manuel Perez, a former FBI agent, to put him on alert. Perez was equally unconvinced. I said, ‘Forget about it,’ Perez recalls. Nobody is flying today.

The two men had good reason to be skeptical. Within minutes of the terrorist attacks on 9/11, the Federal Aviation Administration had sent out a special notification called a NOTAM—a notice to airmen—to airports all across the country, ordering every airborne plane in the United States to land at the nearest airport as soon as possible, and prohibiting planes on the ground from taking off. Initially, there were no exceptions whatsoever. Later, when the situation stabilized, several airports accepted flights for emergency medical and military operations—but those were few and far between.

Nevertheless, at 1:30 or 2 p.m. on the thirteenth, Dan Grossi received his phone call. He was told the Saudis would be delivered to Raytheon Airport Services, a private hangar at Tampa International Airport. When he arrived, Manny Perez was there to meet him.

At the terminal a woman laughed at Grossi for even thinking he would be flying that day. Commercial flights had slowly begun to resume, but at 10:57 a.m., the FAA had issued another NOTAM, a reminder that private aviation was still prohibited. Three private planes violated the ban that day, in Maryland, West Virginia, and Texas, and in each case a pair of jet fighters quickly forced the aircraft down. As far as private planes were concerned, America was still grounded.

Then one of the pilots arrived. Here’s your plane, he told Grossi. Whenever you’re ready to go.

What happened next was first reported by Kathy Steele, Brenna Kelly, and Elizabeth Lee Brown in the Tampa Tribune in October 2001. Not a single other American paper seemed to think the subject was news-worthy.³⁰

Grossi and Perez say they waited until three young Saudi men, all apparently in their early twenties, arrived. Then the pilot took Grossi, Perez, and the Saudis to a well-appointed ten-passenger Learjet. They departed for Lexington at about four-thirty.³¹

They got the approval somewhere, said Perez. It must have come from the highest levels of government.³²

Flight restrictions had not been lifted yet, Grossi said. I was told it would take White House approval. I thought [the flight] was not going to happen.³³

Grossi said he did not get the names of the Saudi students he was escorting. It happened so fast, Grossi says. I just knew they were Saudis. They were well connected. One of them told me his father or his uncle was good friends with George Bush senior.³⁴

How did the Saudis go about getting approval? According to the Federal Aviation Administration, they didn’t and the Tampa flight never took place. It’s not in our logs, Chris White, a spokesman for the FAA, told the Tampa Tribune. . . . It didn’t occur.³⁵ The White House also said that the flights to evacuate the Saudis did not take place.

According to Grossi, about one hour and forty-five minutes after takeoff they landed at Blue Grass Airport in Lexington, a frequent destination for Saudi horse-racing enthusiasts such as Prince Ahmed bin Salman. When they arrived, the Saudis were greeted by an American who took custody of them and helped them with their baggage. On the tarmac was a 747 with Arabic writing on the fuselage, apparently ready to take them back to Saudi Arabia. My understanding is that there were other Saudis in Kentucky buying racehorses at that time, and they were going to fly back together, said Grossi.

With just three Saudis on it, the Tampa flight was hardly the only mysterious trip under way. All over the country, members of the extended bin Laden family, the House of Saud, and their associates were assembling in various locations. At least seven other planes were available for their transportation. Officially, the FBI says it had nothing to do with the repatriation of the Saudis. I can say unequivocally that the FBI had no role in facilitating these flights one way or another, says Special Agent John Iannarelli.³⁶

Bandar, however, characterized the role of the FBI very differently. With coordination with the FBI, he said on CNN, we got them all out.

Meanwhile, the Saudis had at least two of the planes on call to repatriate the bin Ladens. One of them began picking up family members all across the country. Starting in Los Angeles on an undetermined date, it flew first to Orlando, Florida, where Khalil Binladin, a sibling of Osama bin Laden’s, boarded.³⁷ From Orlando, the plane continued to Dulles International Airport outside Washington, before going on to Logan Airport in Boston on September 19, picking up members of the bin Laden family along the way.

As the planes prepared for takeoff at each location across the country, the FBI repeatedly got into disputes with Rihab Massoud, Bandar’s chargé d’affaires at the Saudi embassy in Washington. I recall getting into a big flap with Bandar’s office about whether they would leave without us knowing who was on the plane, said one former agent who participated in the repatriation of the Saudis.³⁸ Bandar wanted the plane to take off and we were stressing that that plane was not leaving until we knew exactly who was on it.

In the end, the FBI was only able to check papers and identify everyone on the flights. In the past, the FBI had been constrained from arbitrarily launching investigations without a predicate—i.e., a strong reason to believe that an individual had been engaged in criminal activities. Spokesmen for the FBI assert that the Saudis had every right to leave the country.

Meanwhile, President Bush was in Washington working full-time at the White House to mobilize a global antiterror coalition. On Friday, September 14, a dozen ambassadors from Arab nations—Syria, the Palestinian Authority, Algeria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, and the Persian Gulf states—met at Prince Bandar’s home in McLean, Virginia, to discuss how they would respond to Bush’s new policies.³⁹ Bandar himself had pledged his support for the war on terror and, perhaps most important, vowed that Saudi Arabia would help stabilize the world oil markets. In a breathtaking display of their command over the oil markets, the Saudis dispatched 9 million barrels of oil to the United States. As a consequence, the price instantly dropped from $28 to $22 per barrel.⁴⁰

On Tuesday, September 18, at Logan Airport, a specially reconfigured Boeing 727 with about thirty first-class seats had been chartered by the bin Ladens and flew five passengers, all of them members of the bin Laden family, out of the country from Boston.

The next day, September 19, President Bush met with the president of Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim country, and with the foreign ministers of Russia and Germany. His speechwriting team was also working on a stirring speech to be delivered the next day, officially declaring a global war on terror. Our war on terror . . . will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated, he vowed.⁴¹

Meanwhile, the plane that had originated in Los Angeles and gone to Orlando and Washington, another Boeing 727, was due to touch down at Boston’s Logan International Airport.⁴²

At the time, Logan was in chaos. The two hijacked planes that had crashed into the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers had departed from Logan. The airport was reeling from criticism that its security failures had allowed the hijackings to take place, and exceptional measures were now being taken. Several thousand cars were towed from the airport’s parking garages. We didn’t know if they were booby-trapped or what, said Tom Kinton, director of aviation at Logan.⁴³

Even though the Federal Aviation Administration had allowed commercial flights to resume on September 13, because of various security issues, Logan did not reopen until September 15, two days later.⁴⁴ Even then, air traffic resumed slowly.

Then, in the early afternoon of September 19, a call came into Logan’s Emergency Operations Center saying that the private charter aircraft was going to pick up members of the bin Laden family.⁴⁵ Both Kinton and Virginia Buckingham, the head of the Massachusetts Port Authority, which oversees Logan, were incredulous. We were in the midst of the worst terrorist act in history, Kinton said. And here we were seeing an evacuation of the bin Ladens!

Like Kinton, Virginia Buckingham was stunned that the bin Laden family was being spirited out of the country. My staff was told that a private jet was arriving at Logan from Saudi Arabia to pick up fourteen members of Osama bin Laden’s family living in the Boston area, she later wrote in the Boston Globe.⁴⁶ ‘Does the FBI know?’ staffers wondered. ‘Does the State Department know? Why are they letting these people go? Have they questioned them?’ This was ridiculous.*

Yet there was little that Logan officials could do. Federal law did not give them much leeway in terms of restricting an individual flight. So bravado would have to do in the place of true authority, wrote Buckingham.⁴⁷

"Again and again, Tom Kinton asked for official word from the FBI. ‘Tell the tower that plane is not coming in here until somebody in Washington tells us it’s okay,’ he said.

As the bin Ladens were about to land, the top brass at Logan Airport did not know what was going on. The FBI’s counterterrorism unit should have been a leading force in the domestic battle against terror, but here it was not even going to interview the Saudis.

Each time, Buckingham wrote, the answer was the same: ‘Let them leave.’ On September 19, under the cover of darkness, they did.

*  *  *

Of course, the vast majority of the Saudis on those planes had nothing whatsoever to do with Osama bin Laden. The bin Laden family itself had expressed the strongest denunciation and condemnation of this sad event, which resulted in the loss of many innocent men, women, and children, and which contradicts our Islamic faith.⁴⁸ And a persuasive case could be made that it was against the interests of the royal family and the bin Ladens to have aided the terrorists.

On the other hand, this was the biggest crime in American history. A global manhunt of unprecedented proportions was under way. Thousands of people had just been killed by Osama bin Laden. Didn’t it make sense to at least interview his relatives and other Saudis who, inadvertently or not, may have aided him?

Moreover, Attorney General John Ashcroft had asserted that the government had a responsibility to use every legal means at our disposal to prevent further terrorist activity by taking people into custody who have violated the law and who may pose a threat to America.⁴⁹ All over the country Arabs were being rounded up and interrogated. By the weekend after the attacks, Ashcroft, to the dismay of civil libertarians, had already put together a package of proposals broadening the FBI’s power to detain foreigners, wiretap them, and trace money-laundering to terrorists. Some suspects would be held for as long as ten months at the American naval base in Guantánamo, Cuba.

In an ordinary murder investigation, it is commonplace to interview relatives of the prime suspect. When the FBI talks to subjects during an investigation, the questioning falls into one of two categories. Friendly subjects are interviewed and suspects or unfriendly subjects are interrogated. How did the Saudis get a pass?

And did a simple disclaimer from the bin Laden family mean no one in the entire family had any contacts or useful information whatsoever? Did that mean the FBI should simply drop all further inquiries? At the very least, wouldn’t family members be able to provide U.S. investigators with some information about Osama’s finances, people who might know who him or might be aiding Al Qaeda?

Moreover, national security experts found it hard to believe that no one in the entire extended bin Laden family had any contact whatsoever with Osama. There is no reason to think that every single member of his family has shut him down, said Paul Michael Wihbey, a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies.⁵⁰

Vincent Cannistraro, a former CIA counterterrorism chief, told the New Yorker, I’ve been following the bin Ladens for years, and it’s easy to say, ‘We disown him.’ Many in the family have. But blood is usually thicker than water.⁵¹

In fact, Osama was not the only bin Laden who had ties to militant Islamic fundamentalists. As early as 1979, Mahrous bin Laden, an older half brother of Osama’s, had befriended members of the militant Muslim Brotherhood and had, perhaps unwittingly, played a key role in a violent armed uprising against the House of Saud in Mecca in 1979, which resulted in more than one hundred deaths.

Another bin Laden relative, Osama’s brother-in-law Mohammed Jamal Khalifa, was widely reported to be an important figure in Al Qaeda and was tied to the men behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, to the October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole, and was alleged to have funded a Philippine terrorist group.

Khalil Binladin, who boarded the plane in Orlando to leave the United States, won the attention of Brazilian investigators for possible terrorist connections. According to the German wire service Deutsche Presse-Agentur, he had business connections in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais and visited its capital, Belo Horizonte, which was allegedly a center for training terrorists, including members of the Hezbollah movement.

How is it possible that Saudis were allowed to fly even when all of America, FBI agents included, was grounded? Had the White House approved the operation—and, if so, why?

When Bandar arrived at the White House on Thursday, September 13, 2001, he and President Bush retreated to the Truman Balcony, a casual outdoor spot behind the pillars of the South Portico that also provided a bit of privacy. Over the years, any history made on the Truman Balcony had transpired in informal conversation. In 1992, nine years earlier, President Bush’s father, George H. W. Bush, had walked out on the balcony with Boris Yeltsin, the first democratically elected president of Russia, to celebrate the end of the Cold War. In 1993, after First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton put an end to smoking in the White House, Bill Clinton would sometimes retreat there to smoke a cigar in a celebratory moment, as he did after the United States rescued a soldier in Bosnia.

This occasion may have marked the beginning of a new era, but Bandar and President Bush had nothing to celebrate. Thousands of Americans were dead. They had been killed in a terrorist operation largely run by Saudis. Nonetheless, the two men each lit up a Cohiba and began to discuss how they would work together in the war on terror. Bush said that the United States would hand over any captured Al Qaeda operatives to the Saudis if they would not cooperate. The implication was clear: the Saudis could use any means necessary—including torture—to get the suspects to talk.⁵²

But the larger points went unspoken. The two men were scions of the most powerful dynasties in the world. The Bush family and its close associates—the House of Bush, if you will—included two presidents of the United States; former secretary of state James Baker, who had been a powerful figure in four presidential administrations; key figures in the oil and defense industries, the Carlyle Group, and the Republican Party; and much, much more. As for Bandar, his family effectively was the government of Saudi Arabia, the most powerful country in the Arab world. They had hundreds of billions of dollars and the biggest oil reserves in the world. The relationship was unprecedented. Never before had a president of the United States—much less, two presidents from the same family—had such close personal and financial ties to the ruling family of another foreign power.

Yet few Americans realized that these two dynasties, the Bush family and the House of Saud, had a history dating back more than twenty years. Not just business partners and personal friends, the Bushes and the Saudis had pulled off elaborate covert operations and gone to war together. They had shared secrets that involved unimaginable personal wealth, spectacular military might, the richest energy resources in the world, and the most odious crimes imaginable.

They had been involved in the Iran-contra scandal, and in secret U.S. aid in the Afghanistan War that gave birth to Osama bin Laden. Along with then Vice President Bush, the Saudis had joined the United States in supporting the brutal Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein for seven full years after knowing that he had used weapons of mass destruction. In the private sector, the Saudis had supported George W. Bush’s struggling oil company, Harken Energy, and in the nineties they made common cause with his father by investing in the Carlyle Group. In the 1991 Gulf War, the Saudis and the elder Bush had fought side by side. And now there was the repatriation of the bin Ladens, which could not have taken place without approval at the highest levels of the executive branch of President George W. Bush’s administration.

Only Bush and Bandar know what transpired that day on the Truman Balcony. But the ties between the two families were so strong that allowing the Saudis to leave America would not have been difficult for Bush. It would also have been in character with a relationship in which decisions were often made through elaborate and contrived deniability mechanisms that allowed the principals to turn a blind eye to unseemly realities and to be intentionally out of the loop.

The ties between the two families were an open secret that in some ways was as obvious as the proverbial elephant in the living room. Yet at the same time it was somehow hard to discern even for the most seasoned journalists. Perhaps that was because the relationship had been forged all over the globe and arced across different eras—from the Reagan-Bush years to the Clinton administration to the presidency of George W. Bush. To understand its scope and its meaning, one would have to search through tens of thousands of forgotten newspaper stories, read scores of books by journalists and historians, and study myriad Secret classified documents and the records of barely remembered congressional probes of corporate intrigue and Byzantine government scandals. One would have to journey back in time to the birth of Al Qaeda at the terrorist training camps during the Afghanistan War. One would have to study the Iran-Iraq War of the eighties, the 1991 Gulf War, and the Iraq War of 2003. One would have to try to deduce what had happened within the corporate suites of oil barons in Dallas and Houston, in the executive offices of the Carlyle Group, in the Situation Room of the White House, and in the grand royal palaces of Saudi billionaires. One would have to interview scores of politicians, oil executives, counterterrorism analysts, CIA operatives, and businessmen from Washington and Saudi Arabia and Texas. One would have to decipher brilliantly hidden agendas and purposefully murky corporate relationships.

Finally, one would have to put all this information together to shape a continuum, a narrative in which the House of Bush and the House of Saud dominated the world stage together in one era after another. Having done so, one would come to a singular inescapable conclusion: namely, that, horrifying as it sounds, the secret relationship between these two great families helped to trigger the Age of Terror and give rise to the tragedy of 9/11.

CHAPTER TWO

The Houston-Jeddah Connection

On a warm August night in 2002, James R. Bath, a little-known Texas businessman, opens the door to the front of his ranch in Liberty, a town of eight thousand people on the Trinity River outside Houston. His house is framed by trees silhouetted against a moonlit Texas sky.

About six feet tall, trim and balding, Bath mingles a wry, folksy Texas charm with some of the machismo of a veteran jet fighter pilot. The combination has served him well in cultivating relationships with some of the great Texas power brokers of the last generation—from former governor John Connally to the Bush family.

There are many ways to tell the story of the events leading up to September 11 and the Iraq War of 2003, and Bath is hardly the most important person through whom to view them. However, his very obscurity carries its own significance. Bath happens to have served as the intentionally low-profile middleman in a passion play of sorts, the saga of how the House of Saud and its surrogates first courted the Bush family.

Bath is disarmingly hospitable as he whips up a late-night dinner and recounts the story of the birth of the Houston-Jeddah connection in the 1970s. A native of Natchitoches, Louisiana, he moved to Houston in 1965 at the age of twenty-nine to join the Texas Air National Guard. In the late sixties, after working for Atlantic Aviation, a Delaware-based company that sold business aircraft, he moved to Houston and went on to become an airplane broker on his own. Sometime around 1974—he doesn’t recall the exact date—Bath was trying to sell a F-27 turboprop, a sluggish medium-range plane that was not exactly a hot ticket in those days, when he